


(so long the visible wrath)

by lalaietha



Category: Clash of the Titans (2010)
Genre: Gen, Other, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-07
Updated: 2010-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Io stands still in her travel- and now blood-stained garments, alone in the Hall of the Gods, save for their king and lord and the author of all her life's anguish, and the one against whom she had designed to pit his own son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(so long the visible wrath)

**Author's Note:**

> Set, obviously, between Io's evaporation outside of Medusa's temple, and the culmination of the final battle. I have connected movie!Io and myth!Io's stories where they can be harmonized.

Olympus still feels cold to her, its echoing palaces and awe-inspiring grandeur lifeless and sterile.

That it is completely emptied and that she wears her own human shape does nothing to change the feeling. She knows where she is, and she knows where she was: dying on the broken ground outside Medusa's prison and tomb, lying to Perseus and saying it would be all right in the end, so that he would go and do what she has spent so very long waiting for him to do.

Io stands still in her travel- and now blood-stained garments, alone in the Hall of the Gods, save for their king and lord and the author of all her life's anguish, and the one against whom she had designed to pit his own son.

Zeus sits not on his throne, but at its feet, with the world and its destruction spread out before him. He shines, because he is a god, is God, but his light seems - dimmer, somehow. The last time she saw him, saw Him, the creator of mankind and the ruling Father of the world, he had driven her to her knees in terror at his wrath, and his curse.

He frightens her still, but not as much. Not enough. She has saved and guarded his son to destroy his reign, made certain Perseus survived, was raised and was loved by human hands and human hearts, by a man and a woman and the daughter they made. She has turned the son of Zeus against the gods, because only a man would, but only a god _could_ break their rule.

It is vengeance. For herself, and for Medusa, and for a dead queen, executed for the crime of being deceived by mankind's own creator, who used her as he always did, and then did nothing to come to her aid.

"I hope his mother laughs at you from Tartarus," Io tells the king of the gods.

Zeus sits back, but doesn't look at her. Her words seem to amuse rather than anger him, and he replies, "Hades might even let her see. He has great faith in his triumph."

"He tricked you." It's a cold, bitter sort of pleasure, because so many will die for this, and Io mourns each one of them - but it is pleasure nonetheless. She is too old now to be ashamed of it: she has no power to save those lives, or even ease the fear of their passing, and even bitter triumph is still triumph.

Zeus doesn't answer. Io adds, "And he's wrong."

Only now does Zeus seem to hear her. He stands, and she is afraid again: afraid, and angry, her hands clenching to fists at her sides. She is tired, and she is cold, and this place no longer loves her, and she does not know which is worse: if Hera were to see her now, or the God-Queen's absence, the pitiless denial that Io had ever existed, ever mattered, ever been loved.

Zeus stands, and turns to face her, and she is conscious of being small, and defenceless, and though ageless and undying so very, very mortal - save that she is already dead.

"You have great faith in my son," Zeus says, in a voice that might be used to observe that the sun is hot today, or that a particular peacock has lost a feather. And in the fury born of terror, Io spits at his feet.

"He is not your son," she tells him, and stands in judgement on the Father of the Gods. "You only sired him. You gave up any right to him the day you let his mother's husband shove them both in a coffin and throw them to your brother's tender mercies. His _father_ died, blameless, at Hades' hand in Poseidon's depths. Along with his mother-by-love, and his sister."

Olympus still answers him, though, and Io takes two stumbling steps back when the rolling thunder shakes the ground beneath her feet. But she will not fall to her knees. Not again, and not here.

"Have a care, Io," Zeus warns her, and she makes herself lift her chin and keep her eyes on his face.

"Why?" she demands. "I've already been raped, cast off, turned into a cow, cursed, and my child stolen from me and killed. I have lived to watch everyone and everything I ever loved or cared for crumble into dust and be forgotten, or be smashed for _your_ transgression, and now I've died, slowly, stabbed in the gut outside the last refuge of a woman who was more my sister than anything, who I condemned to death for my enterprise." She throws out her arms, encompassing every wrong. "There is more you can do to me, o lord of Olympus, but it would only be more of the same."

Somewhere, down there, the kraken has arisen. People are dying. Perseus may be saving them. Andromeda has probably offered herself up to appease the gods' wrath, without understanding how far this is beyond the pale of her understanding, and how little it would do. She will be a great queen, if she survives this.

Io wonders if she will stop at Hades, or if for this she will spend her eternity in Tartarus: for a moment, standing and pretending she is not terrified before the anger in the face of the king of the gods, she is sure it is the latter.

Then something clears, and the thunder stops, and Zeus only says, "You aren't actually dead," and returns to his seat at the foot of his throne, and watches the world below him once more.

Io stares at him. "What?" she says, taken aback, caught without an answer and without understanding as the blow she was awaiting does not come, and the words that she hears do not make sense.

"I created mankind, Io," Zeus says, glancing at her. "It is a far simpler matter to save the life of a woman already born, whose shape I already know."

Her stomach churns: the animal part of her rejoicing at the thought of life, and the too-old soul within it raging and sick, at the thought that this gift once again comes from Him. "Why?" she demands.

"Why not?" Zeus replies, and that is not enough.

Io crosses, steps down into the image of the world spread out below them and stands before him again. "_Why_?"

Beneath her feet, the kraken drags its misbegotten body onto the shore. She can't look down: she can't know that it is there, she cannot think of Perseus and Argos now. There is nothing she can do - even if she is not, as she thought before, now dead.

Zeus looks away from the battle that faces the child he never lifted a finger to save before. He is not only dimmer in his light: he is older to her eyes, she realizes, he who ought to be immortal and unchanging.

"Because if my brother's tool had not put his sword through your belly," says Zeus, who is still the author of all pain in her life, "you would have lived, if my son was to live and Hades not to rule us all, and he will grieve to be without you. And if I cannot return his, as you say, true father, and his mother and his sister from my brother's realm, I can at least return you to him."

Io's teeth close on the inside of her cheek, and she struggles with this, and says, quiet and hard, "I am not a prize to be won and owned, nor a possession to be returned. He understands that, even if it is beyond you."

"It has been pointed out to me, of late, that my understanding of my mortal children may be very poor indeed," says the Father of the Gods, as if agreeing with her. "Nevertheless. Your life, I give you back. And if we are not all to worship the king of the dead, then when this is over I shall put you down where you and he may find each other again." He waves a hand, no longer looking at her, dismissing her, and says at the last, "You may, of course, decide what you do then."

And then it is if he does not even see her there, though he must look at her feet in order to watch the carnage below.

Io does not watch. Perseus will win. She has made sure of this - and, if the taste is bitter it is still the truth, so has the god she stands before. For some time, this tension makes her want to scream and she stands, wordless, torn by it.

Perseus has already won, and Poseidon chosen to see him and the rescued Andromeda to a friendly seashore somewhere, when Io finally says, "If I am to return to the earth and live, I would appreciate a garment that isn't stained with my own gore."

**Author's Note:**

> To everyone who got the St Anselm reference, I raise my glass.


End file.
